Brad Gregory

Biography

Brad Gregory has been a faculty member in the History Department at Notre Dame since 2003. From 1996-2003 he taught and received early tenure at Stanford University; prior to that he was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University as well as two degrees in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.

During his career he has lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in North America and in more than twenty countries. His first book, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Harvard, 1999) received six book awards, and he has won multiple teaching awards at both Stanford and Notre Dame. In 2005, he was named the inaugural winner of the first annual Hiett Prize in the Humanities, a $50,000 award from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture given to the outstanding mid-career humanities scholar in the United States. His book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012) garnered over 100 reviews internationally and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Polish, Arabic, and Romanian, with a forthcoming translation into Chinese. In 2025 he delivered the Thomas Burns Memorial Lectures at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and was inducted into the American Academy of Sciences and Letters. The working title of his current book project is The Way of the World: Power, Wealth, and Civilization from the Last Ice Age to the Anthropocene.